Erick Medel: El Mañana

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present El Mañana, a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles artist Erick Medel, his second with the gallery. Medel captures the vibrancy of his eastside neighborhood in works that range from intimate snapshots to expansive street scenes, always with the aim of distilling and preserving the ephemeral feelings and fleeing moments that make up a thriving community. These works also celebrate a bustling street culture that has suffered a summer of ICE raids and unrest, which has stolen a sense of security that will be slow to return. Medel captures the resilience and ingenuity of this community, preserving its small joys and hidden beauties as a reservoir of hope for tomorrow.

Medel’s medium is fiber – he “paints” with a sewing machine on dark, heavy gauge denim, intuitively selecting color from a wall-sized bank of threads. The deep denim support enhances color by contrast, lending Medel’s compositions a quiet luminosity. Denim also brings to the work its long association with labor and its origins as a sturdy fabric developed to protect the bodies of workers. More personally, denim recalls the protective wear used by the artist’s father in his work as a gardener. Denim provides a strong base for many layers of stitching, which lend depth and shading to the compositions – most apparent here in his portraits of the neighborhood’s animal denizens. This body of work also finds Medel experimenting with abstraction, transforming backgrounds into blocks of solid color that lock together like puzzle pieces. This development grew out of a deepening interest in the history of abstract figuration by artists such as Alice Neel and Noah Davis.

The largest work in the exhibition is City Angels which takes as its focus a food vendor pushing her cart through a sea of blue-clad Dodger fans. Medel builds compositions based on his own photography, and he has a particular skill for finding visual and narrative tension. Amidst World Series celebrations, he foregrounds the enterprising hustle of the vendors who are a staple of any Los Angeles street scene. The vendor’s focus seems turned inward, as if Medel has captured a private, thoughtful moment that sets her apart from the wider crowd. At this moment in time, a crowd taking to the streets cannot help but evoke the city's recent anti-ICE protests. For Medel, being on the street is a political act, both a defiant reclamation of space and a holding for those who don’t currently feel safe enough to participate. 

Medel also celebrates the hustle of immigrant communities by showcasing the wares of neighborhood street vendors, who sell colorful lucha libre masks or smiling imitation Labubus. These objects are aspirational – fancy toys being made available at bargain prices, shiny second skins rich with cultural significance. On the one hand, lucha libre represents a masculine sense of strength and cultural pride, but it can also be read as a stand-in for the metaphorical masks required for assimilation in a sometimes-hostile place. The masks are shown here empty and lifeless, perhaps an allusion to the diminished vibrancy of street culture in these trying times. Medel offers a kind of solution in Limpias, whose spiritual cleansings may provide hope against the hardships of the moment.

Above all, Medel’s subject is the vibrant street-level culture in and around his studio. His compositions capture moments encountered in life and tenderly rendered in polyester and thread. A series of small works feature the flora and fauna of his Boyle Heights neighborhood – the hibiscus and hollyhocks that dot front yards and curbsides; feisty chihuahuas, proud backyard roosters, and fluffy street cats. His superb sense of color and shading is most on display in these works, whose close-up view allows for subtleties of tone and shadow. This is all the more impressive considering that for these works color is mixed only in the eye; each thread’s distinct hue stands apart yet visually blends into the wider whole. The resulting images appear soft when viewed from a distance, but up close vibrate with expressive visual energy.

 In the downstairs gallery, Medel has curated the group exhibition Neighbors, featuring painting and sculpture by artists who make up Medel’s own community of peers. The show will include works by Alex Becerra, Alan Chin, Daniel Gibson, Sean Hutton, Sarah Kim, Higinio Martinez, Alex McAdoo and Ohad Sarfaty.